How do you teach something that took twenty years to learn?

Early in my buying career, I split a seasonal budget for several luxury brands — Roberto Cavalli, Valentino, Missoni among them — almost exactly in half between the pre-collection and the main collection.

My logic felt solid. The main collection was the fashion show. It would be in the magazines — this was before social media decided such things — it carried the brand's image, it was the fashion everyone would talk about. The pre-collection got barely any coverage. Surely the money should follow the spotlight.

What I hadn't factored in was everything that doesn't appear in a magazine. Pre-collections arrive in stores months earlier and get a long, quiet run at full price. Main collections arrive late, sell for a couple of months at best, carry higher price points that slow them down further, and are usually smaller ranges in the first place. The spotlight and the sell-through pointed in opposite directions, and I had budgeted for the spotlight.

The consequence arrived as an uncomfortable conversation with the finance department — and then as a colleague from finance being sent along to my next buying appointments to keep an eye on my budgets.

Here is the part that has stayed with me for twenty years.

He was new to the company. I had been in the role for two years. And he knew something fundamental about my job that I didn't.

Why is fashion industry knowledge so hard to teach?

Nothing about the pre/main split requires twenty years to understand. It isn't intuition, or taste, or relationships. It's a structural fact about how the fashion calendar and money interact — the kind of thing that fits on a checklist. Before you split a budget, check the delivery windows. Check the sell-through periods. Check the range sizes.

But nobody handed me that checklist at the time — a master's in fashion buying came close, years later, but by then I had already paid for the lesson. Inside the industry, that knowledge lives scattered across roles — some of it in the buying office, some of it in finance, some of it in the stockroom — and each role sees its own slice. I learned my slice the way nearly everyone learns it: by making the decision, getting it wrong, and sitting in the meeting where the consequence landed.

That is how many industries teach their own, fashion included — and it's a large part of why experienced employees are worth what they cost. Not explanation — consequence. It works, eventually. It's also slow, expensive, and available only to people who are already inside.

What the classroom can teach — and what it struggles with

Alongside my work in the industry, I spent several years teaching fashion business at university level. Seeing students wrestle with many of the same invisible decisions I'd encountered in industry changed the way I thought about fashion education.

Concepts transfer well in a classroom. Vocabulary transfers well. What resists transfer is the judgment that sits underneath — and the clearest example I know is the gap between a collection and a business.

A design graduate learns to create a complete collection, and as an exercise in craft it's exactly right: range architecture, a coherent point of view, a world. But the market asks a new label a different and much narrower question first: which product, sold where, to whom, at what price? Technology startups have a name for that question — a go-to-market strategy. In fashion, you rarely hear that phrase applied to a brand. The industry runs on the answer; it just rarely names the question, and what goes unnamed is extraordinarily hard to teach.

I watched young brands work this out the slow way: with a consultant, through the budgets and the disappointing sales meetings, narrowing a full range down to the one product that could actually open doors, selling that, and only then expanding. The realisation that lands hardest isn't any single step. It's that the process takes years — years most founders spend discovering what the question was.

Which of the twenty years were actually necessary?

Looking back honestly, my twenty years divide into two kinds of time.

Some of it was genuinely necessary. Market judgment is local: the industry runs on one global logic, but it isn't the same everywhere, and understanding a market's particular version takes real exposure. Taste, relationships, reading a room at a showroom appointment — I don't believe any of that compresses.

But a surprising amount of it was simply waiting. Waiting for a season to end to find out whether a buy had worked. Waiting to be senior enough to sit in the meetings where the interesting decisions happened. Waiting for something to go wrong, because the way things go wrong is where the deepest lessons live — and you can't schedule a crisis.

The waiting wasn't teaching me. The decisions and their consequences were teaching me; the waiting was just the industry's delivery schedule for them.

Teaching fashion business made me keep returning to the same question: how many of these decisions could students experience long before they entered the industry? Not by replacing internships or professional practice—but by letting learners make realistic decisions in a safe environment where the consequences become part of the lesson.

When I started in fashion, I was drawn to the visible parts of the industry—the campaigns, the fashion weeks, the glamour. It took years before I understood how many invisible decisions made those visible moments possible.

The industry's most valuable knowledge isn't hidden because it's secret. It's hidden because it's scattered across departments, meetings and seasons—and often you only encounter each piece after you've already made the mistake.

That, it turns out, is a design brief.

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Ekaterina Adamovich spent twenty years in fashion buying, wholesale, consulting and education before founding Sim de la Mode — an iOS game that teaches fashion business through interactive missions where players build their own virtual fashion brand. Phase 1 is free on the App Store, with new learning missions launching in August 2026. Pilots with a small number of institutions are planned this autumn — get in touch if you're interested in a pilot.